Developing Intercultural Awareness by Integrating Features of Englishness and Romanianness

In the 20th and 21st centuries the importance of cultural elements in education has increased, competences of cultural and intercultural awareness becoming more and more important. These are skills teachers in the field of ELT focus on, in order to develop students’ understanding of their own culture and other cultures, as a manner of expressing their identity and adapting to the requirements of the global world. Our intention is to discover how English/Romanian characteristics are viewed by Philology students training to be teachers of English in Romania, at the West University of Timișoara, to what extent Englishness and Romanianness meet, to distinguish similarities and differences and inquire how these elements are to be found in teaching English. The data used will be both theoretical (collected from studies already published) and empirical (through qualitative and quantitative research methods). The focus of the paper is to discover the common and different characteristics of the English and Romanian, see how they are discussed and analysed in specialized courses (culture and civilization) and how they lead to the development of identity features and improve intercultural awareness, as only learning about others, discovering own and other identities are manners of accepting the difference and becoming tolerant.
Keywords: cultural/intercultural awareness, identity, Englishness, Romanianness